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Theorizing Self-Destructive Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2013

Banu Bargu*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, New School for Social Research, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: [email protected]

Extract

The first image that the question of violence in the Middle East conjures up, especially in the West, is that of the suicide bomber. This association, etched into the political imaginary particularly over the course of the last two decades, is due neither to the number of victims suicide bombing creates (more conventional weapons of war can claim as many or more victims), nor to the identity of its victims (conventional weapons are also often directed at civilians). Rather, the potency of the image of the suicide bomber is connected to the simultaneously self-destructive and other-directed form that this act of violence takes. If the Orientalist impulse that has raised the image of the suicide bomber to iconic status is deeply problematic, it nonetheless constitutes an involuted acknowledgement of a reality: the significant rise in self-destructive violence (and not just in the Middle East). I have in mind practices such as hunger striking, self-immolation, and fatal self-mutilation, which constitute an emergent repertoire of struggle that has come to mark a certain current of radical politics around the globe. Those modalities of self-destructive violence that are not directed at others are overshadowed by suicide bombing.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 For a prominent example of this kind of work (though with a different geographical focus), see Feldman, Allen, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On self-destructive political practices in Turkey's prisons, see Bargu, Banu, Starve & Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

2 Althusser, Louis, “Lenin and Philosophy,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Brewster, Ben (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 64Google Scholar.